In 2000, John Updike wrote a consideration of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" for the New Yorker and called it OZ IS US. He must have meant "the U.S." as well as "we Americans." Since Updike gave an early appreciative salute to "Wicked" in that same magazine, I have been partial to his take on that weird utopia, however pasteboard, Technicolored, giddily dangerous if not demented it appears. Updike said, "a dizzying, virtually bacterial multitudinousness came to characterize Oz as sequels multiplied its regions and its strange and magical tribes..."
